and
https://youtu.be/bi1I-fgB_xg?si=X6p9z4lGkz5ZeNjl
~~ recommended by collectivist action ~~
Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.
Shit is out da box even as the dominant United States media-politics culture tries to make it all seem like same old business as usual: lots to superficially see between commercials and nothing to deeply understand or radically oppose.
Just a Matter of Time
The “world’s greatest country” is now a shooting gallery, for example. Awash with 125 firearms for every 100 people and with more than 40 million military-style assault weapons, Armed Madhouse USA is now averaging two mass shootings per day.
The slaughters don’t make the national news anymore unless the body count is at least ten. The bigger ones are followed by the usual NRA-cancelled dead- end debate of (a) “it’s the guns” (which it is) versus (b) “it’s mental illness” and/or “moral failure.” No serious gun reform ever follows despite huge majority support for gun control.
Everyone knows it’s just a matter of time until the next Columbine, Aurora, Parkland, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, El Paso, Lewiston, Maine, etc.
The giant, ever more militarized US police state pretends to hate it but its leaders and the right wing love it. The gendarme state draws strength from the Hobbesian gun chaos and the ever more genocidal and eliminationist Republi-fascist knows and digs that the weapons loose in the homeland are very disproportionately owned by their base.
Oh well…
The Greenhouse Gas Chamber
Another example: capitalism-generated environmental calamities are standard old news now. Mass death and destruction occurs with increasing regularity in epic hurricanes, cyclones, wildfires, floods, and tornados whose extreme intensity and reach are driven by “anthropogenic”/capitalogenic climate change. Boats full of African climate refugees sink in the Mediterranean again and again. Smoke fills the air across vast swaths of the planet during newly extended and ferocious fire seasons.
As the Huxlean-Orwellian-Chomskyean media can’t bring itself to say, this is what happens when humanity lets fossil fuel-addicted capitalism turn the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber. (Exxon-Mobil scientists predicted the warming that would result decades ago. The corporation then buried the projection, joining the rest of commanding heights fossil capital in trashing the climate science it pioneered. Capital values profit over livable ecology.)
My, my.
The Shining Path of Amerikan Trumpism-Fascism
Meanwhile, as the revolutionary communist Bob Avakian wrote just days before January 6 : “The unavoidable truth is that this country, the much-proclaimed ‘Shining City on a Hill, is full of fascists—in the government at all levels and in large parts of the society as a whole.” Nearly three years ago, a fascist US president sparked an attempted coup, trying to negate the peaceful transfer of power after losing an election. Thousands of his frothing Amerikaner backers stormed and trashed the US Capitol, after which a solid majority of his party’s Congresspersons voted not to certify the winner. The president, Donald “Take Down the Mags” Trump, was furious that metal detectors were kept in place to keep openly fascist Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Oath Keepers from bringing AR-15s to the Attack on the Capitol – an attack he wanted to physically join.
(Hey, remember January 6th? That was some heavy shit!)
This orange-brushed brute has a good shot of regaining power next year. He is on a virulent campaign tour holding hate rallies promising virulent white nationalist “RETRIBUTION” and legitimizing the use of lawless political violence in the name of law and order – a classic fascist calling card. He makes holy martyrs out of the hundreds of thugs who were jailed for trying to carry out a white nationalist putsch on January 6. He calls these fascist goons “political hostages.” A Trumpist January 6th Chorus has been formed to promote his classically fascist persecution narrative.
The putschist leader Trump is promising to invade Mexico when he gets back in power. This rabid wannabe strongman has suggested that the US needs to deport all Marxists and socialists currently living on its soil.
He chose to announce his re-election campaign in Waco, Texas, a holy site for Amerikan fascists thanks to the immolation there of the demented, far right Branch Davidian religious cult in a 1993 federal raid. If that seems shocking, consider where Trump went to campaign on the last night of his failed, Covid-19-sunk 2020 presidential campaign. He visited Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a Trumpist teenybopper named Kyle Rittenhouse had the previous August used an illegally owned AR-15 to murder two people at a Black Lives rally.
The right-wing hero Rittenhouse conducted these extra-judicial executions as part of a fascist paramilitary gang called the Kenosha Militia. He was later invited to meet his malignant orange master for a photo-op in Mar a Lago,
The leading international fascist and former Trump advisor and January 6 instigator Steve Bannon half-jokingly says “we’re the Trump Davidians.” A podcaster with a large far-right audience including Trump or at least Trump’s advisors, Bannon likens Trumpenhouse’s 2023 campaign language to the discourse of the Slave Confederacy’s intelligence arm during the US Civil War. “What I didn’t realize,” Bannon has told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, “was that ‘Come Retribution,’ according to some Civil War historians, served as the code words for the Confederate Secret Service’s plot to take hostage — and eventually assassinate — President Abraham Lincoln.” (Bannon digs that. He no doubt dreams about some armed neo-Redeemers taking out Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as a forceful way to elect the new Christian Fascist US Speaker [see below] to the world’s most powerful and dangerous job.)
Trump has at least 70 million Americans on his side. Most of them are down with his Hitlerian Leviathan Lie about the last presidential contest. There is not a single piece of evidence, not a single more court ruling that could convince his army of backers that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen from their Dear Leader.
Even as his fascist movement recruits election workers and public officials to skew the 2024 vote count, even while Amerikaner thugs prepare to intimidate voters in “enemy” (Democratic Party) precincts next year, Trump leads the highly unpopular Joe Biden in five of the handful of contested states that determine US presidential election outcomes under the absurd US Electoral College system. So what if the wannabe strongman president for life Trump faces 91 felony counts for grave crimes against the rule of law and “democracy,” along with civil suits for business fraud and sexual violence? In the large neofascist media-politics bubble, the charges against Trump are seen as proof of his Christ-like martyrdom at the hands of the Marxist-globalist-fascist-Woke Radical Left America-Hating Deep State. Many in Trump’s demented, conspiratorialist base now regularly threatens violence against mainstream capitalist politicians and public officials they absurdly consider part of a “radical left” plot to “destroy our great country.”
Since Trump grudgingly left office, the corrupt women-hating Christian Fascist Supreme Court that he and the crooked former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appointed has re-imposed US states’ right to re-impose the female enslavement of forced motherhood on pregnant women and girls (fourteen states now ban abortion, and five more have severely restricted it). This lethal Court has blown up affirmative action in college admissions, re-legalized Jim Crow in the provision of commercial services, attacked environmental regulations, and rolled back gun control (even as normalized US mass shootings skyrocket) along with other horrific rulings.
Seventeen “red” (Republi-fascist-controlled) states have passed laws making it a crime for teachers to tell basic truths about race and racism in American history past and present. These and other right-wing states are now engaged in a sadistic attack on transgendered youth.
Red (small town and rural) America is rife with assault rifles and with angry white Amerikaners who threaten librarians, teachers, school boards, election officials, election workers, and public health officials. The revanchists are on a book-banning binge, stripping school and public library shelves of volumes that relate Black, Latino, Native American, female, gay, lesbian and transgender history and experience.
A vast Republi-Nazi communications network eggs the Trumpist-fascist base on with an endless stream of paranoid, conspiratorialist messaging about the supposed global-Marxist plot to crush western white civilization. The far-right talk radio freak Marc Levin likens Joe Biden to Joe Stalin. He is a frothing maniac to whom Trump thrown praise.
This is all takes place in a nation stocked with 125 guns for every 100 people, including 44 million military style assault rifles, weapons of war that are disproportionately owned by the right. White nationalist genocide is much closer around the historical corner than all but a few “wolf criers” dare to publicly acknowledge. Fascists are abundant in the nation’s vast army of gendarmes, ex- and current military, and prison guards. AR-15 toting neo-Nazis lurk on the dark web, waiting for the next Trumpy trigger to livestream a racist slaughter.
Meanwhile, the hardcore MAGA-fash Trump-Gaetz wing of the nation’s ever more far rightmost major party has put a previously unknown Christian Fascist, a semi-erudite troglodyte with ill intent, atop the US House of Representatives. Sitting two heartbeats away from the presidency and in position to shut down the US government in eleven days, “MAGA Mike” Johnson proudly acknowledges that the US is not a democracy and hopes to make it even less of one. He doesn’t go for the separation of church state. He looks forward to passing a national abortion ban, considers homosexuality a disease, and says that prayer is the solution to the nation’s insane gun violence epidemic. This loathsome Amerikaner blames mass shootings on abortion and the teaching of evolution.
“MAGA Mike” wants to cripple the federal government’s ability to tax the rich while complaining about the skyrocketing federal deficit, which he’d like to use to justify tearing up yet more of the US welfare state including Medicare and Social Security. Never mind that the under-taxing of the nation’s grotesquely wealthy Few is the main thing driving US government debt.
The Republi-fascists are panting and pining to replace formerly normative bourgeois democracy, American-Style, with authoritarian neofascist governance, Amerikaner-style. This is their project for 2024-25. The Washington Post reports that their cult leader “Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.” (Now would be a good time for some Trumpenleft cretin to accuse me of “crying wolf”!)
If and when they grab the full reigns, a very distinct possibility in 2024-25, they will have been enabled in their eliminationist undertakings by the ongoing normalization of mass death and fascism that is rife in US media. Beyond occasional MSNBC and CNN spots and New York Times commentaries bemoaning the right-wing “populist” extremism afoot, the general tendency in US media is still very much to frame the nation’s politics as part of the normal conflict between the (unmentionably neo-)“liberal” Democrats and the “conservative” (LOL) Republicans.
Well, we’ll just have to see what happens. It’s up to the voters.
Genocide Joe
Think this essay is a campaign commercial for the dismal dollar-drenched Democrats? Think again. Still clinging to a failing bourgeois democratic constitutional order that is badly tilted to the right, these capitalist-imperialists are deeply complicit in the ongoing and deepening political catastrophe. They are the party of Weimar. Democratic Party-affiliated “liberals” disproportionately own and manage the nation’s commercialized, fascism-fueling war and entertainment media. Their weak and deeply conservative corporate Democratic president Joe Biden – a pathetically uncharismatic bumbler elected by the chance occurrences of Covid-19 and the George Floyd murder – has betrayed one liberal- and progressive-sounding campaign pledge after another (a recent grotesque example among many is Biden’s asinine decision to keep building Trump’s nativist border wall). He has failed miserably to counter the Republi-fascist menace head on again and again (refusing, for example, to use his clear authority to guarantee abortion rights across the US after the 2022 Dobbs v Jackson decision.)
The Democrats are historically a bigger imperialist shedder of blood than the (also blood-soaked and imperialist) Republicans, and US president Joe Biden is a living monument to and agent of that record. He is a despicable warmonger who as a US Senator in the fall of 2002 led the charge for the US Congress’s blank check advance approval of George W. Bush’s criminal, mass-murderous invasion of Iraq. As president, Biden has spent billions on the expansion of an inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine – a miserable stalemate that has killed hundreds of thousands while nudging the risk of nuclear war to its highest level in decades. He is gearing up for a military confrontation with the world’s number two superpower, China, in East Asia.
Biden is deeply complicit in Israel’s racist and genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza. He has signed on fully with US imperial outpost Israel’s escalated mass slaughter of Palestinians in a wildly disproportionate, collectively punitive response to the Islamo-fascist group Hamas’s gruesome October 7th terror attack in southern Israel. “Genocide Joe” quickly flew to Tel Aviv to pledge complete US support for the Zionist occupation and apartheid state of Israel as it wages a criminal war on people (half of whom are children) stuck in the criminally sieged concentration camp that is the Gaza Strip. Biden has even stooped to the level of questioning the civilian casualty reports coming out of Gaza as Israel buries Palestinian children in rubble day after day.
The scenes of devastation resulting from the US-Israel attack are the result of unlawful collective punishment including the merciless bombing of hospitals, schools, bakeries, apartment complexes, and refugee camps. This is US-sponsored Israel doubling and tripling down on its 75-year “Nakba” (Arabic for “catastrophe”) against the Palestinian people. With Washington providing critical military support and political and diplomatic cover, Israel pretends to justify one Holocaust (the one it inflicts on the Palestinians) with another (the one the Nazis inflicted on European Jewry).
The US cable news normalizes and justifies this brazen flouting of law and human decency.
Israel’s Final Solution
Emboldened by longstanding US backing, Israel’s genocidal politicians and pundits have openly declared support for war crimes and crimes against humanity. As Andy Worthington writes, in a richly sourced passage that merits lengthy quotation:
“Western leaders immediately pledged their unconditional support for Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’, failing to react publicly with any caveats when, the next day, the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, stated, unambiguously, ‘I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly’…On October 14, in the most prominent warning that Israel also had nothing but contempt for international humanitarian law, which absolutely prohibits the indiscriminate targeting of a civilian population, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog fully endorsed the collective punishment of the entire population of Gaza, stating, ‘It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware not involved, it’s absolutely not true’, while, in an interview, Sara Netanyahu, the Prime Minister’s Wife, went even further than Yoav Gallant, hoping for ‘a very big revenge’, and adding, ‘I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals.’…Others explicitly called for genocide — the journalist Shimon Riklin, for example, who tweeted that ‘Gaza should be wiped from the face of the earth’, and another journalist, Roy Sharon, who stated, ‘I spoke about a million bodies not as a goal, I said that if, in order to finally eliminate the military capabilities of Hamas … we need a million bodies, then let there be a million bodies.’ The popular Israeli singer Eyal Golan, meanwhile, said, ‘Erase Gaza, don’t leave a single person there’, while Moshe Feiglin, a former Likud MP, stated, ‘It is not Hamas that should be eliminated. Gaza should be razed and Israel’s rule should be restored to the place. This is our country.’…More recently, on Israeli TV, Feiglin, visibly consumed with genocidal hatred, said, ‘We still have not revenged in a biblical way. We did not burn Gaza to ashes immediately. Create a tremendous humanitarian crisis. Level the entire area. Do not leave a stone upon stone in Gaza. Gaza needs to turn to Dresden. Annihilate Gaza now!’…Another journalist, David Mizrahy Verthaim, noted admiringly that ‘World War II ended with the USA inflicting a Holocaust on Hiroshima, and even before giving the Japanese a chance to digest, dropped another bomb on Nagasaki, while promising that every Japanese city would be destroyed until surrender. The Japanese were no less crazy than the Arabs.’…
Jesus Fascist Christ.
There’s a US-/West-backed plan behind Israel’s savagery: the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza, a “second Nakba.” A leaked Israel Ministry of Intelligence document created six days after the Hamas attack calls for the permanent forced transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million Palestinians Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. This forced modern day Trail of Tears “has,” writes the former longtime New York Times Middle East correspondent Chris Hedges, “long been the dream of Israel’s crypto-fascists…Jewish extremists” who now “make up the ruling coalition government” in Tel Aviv. As Hedges notes:
“They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compared to the Biblical Ammonites, massacred by the Israelites. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged…These Jewish fanatics have begun their version of the final solution to the Palestinian problem.”
And not just in Gaza – the ongoing campaign of killing Palestinians in the largely Jewish-occupied West Bank is escalating.
“America’s favorite truck is finally here.”
Fascist Targeting of Homeland “Traitors”
Along the way, the ruling Jewish fascists are carrying out fascist revenge against Israelis who dare to question this “final solution.” As Hedges adds:
“Israel, at the same time, is turning on ‘Jewish traitors’ who refuse to embrace the demented vision of the ruling Jewish fascists and who denounce the horrific violence of the state. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, homosexuals and pacifists — are already being targeted. The judiciary, according to plans put forward by Netanyahu, will be neutered. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as ‘disloyal’ will be deported…Fascists do not respect the sanctity of life. Human beings, even from their own tribe, are expendable to build their deranged utopia.”
Read this remarkable account of the fascist repression being inflicted on dissenting left Israelis by the Knesset member Ofer Cassif:
“It is forbidden to demonstrate and protest against the war. The “only democracy in the Middle East” forbids demonstrations, of both Arab and Jewish citizens — not in support of Hamas, perish the thought — but to oppose the war or simply express humane sympathy for the innocent civilians of Gaza. They are not allowed to do so. Yesterday, there was an attempt by my friends and comrades in Haifa, in the north of Israel, to demonstrate. It was brutally disbanded by the police who beat them and arrested some of them. Right now, it is a fascist regime, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
It is forbidden to express sympathy for the people of Gaza. It’s forbidden to express pain for the kids in Gaza being killed. It’s forbidden to object to the war on social media. People have been fired from their workplaces for doing so. Students have been suspended from their colleges and universities. We’re not talking about one or two people; we’re talking about over 100 and perhaps hundreds. So this is a part of the strategy, as the main victims of the repression are Palestinian citizens.
It’s also true that there are many Jews this is affecting as well. A friend of mine, just today, announced that he was fired from a school he was teaching in because he wrote an objection to the war on Facebook. But the main victims are Palestinians. The state wants them to be silent. The state wants them to bow on their knees in order to live, not to be citizens but subjects. This is part of the subjugation plan.
The worst part I left for the end. It is now legitimate to kill and shoot Palestinian citizens as well as democratic or leftist Jews, as far as the public discourse is concerned. It is not only the public discourse, as the police have turned into a private militia of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
One week ago, there were two demonstrations in Tel Aviv against the war. It was still allowed then. At one of them, the police beat some of the demonstrators, men and women who were 70-plus years old. And then another slightly bigger demonstration, a few hours afterwards, again in Tel Aviv, was viciously and violently attacked by bystanders. The police didn’t help the demonstrators and assisted those who attacked them.”
Conflating Gazan Children with the Nazis
Meanwhile here in the USA, the Republi-fascist Trumpsucker Senator Lyndsey Graham (Rf-SC) says that the US should place “no limit” on number of Palestinian children Israel can kill response to the Hamas terror attack. A common narrative on Fatherland (FOX) News and across the Republi-Nazi swamp genocidally rejects any distinction between Islamo-fascist Hamas and the people of Gaza – this despite polling showing that two thirds of Gazans this summer wanted Hamas to maintain a ceasefire with Israel and that nearly three fourths of Gazans backed a proposal for the Palestinian Authority “take over the administration [of Gaza], with Hamas giving up separate armed units.”
Last Wednesday, the Republi-fascist US House member Brian Mast (Rf-FL) equated Palestinian civilians to civilian supporters of Adolph Hitler during WWII. “I would encourage the other side,” the former Israeli Defense Forces volunteer Mast said on the House floor, “to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians,” Mast said. Not be outdone for anti-Palestinian hatred, Mast’s fellow House Republi-fascist Matt Zinke (Rf-MT) – a former Secretary of the Interior under Herr Trump – “introduced a bill last Thursday to ban Palestinians from entering the U.S. and possibly expel those already living in the imperial homeland. The demented Republi-Nazi and Q-curious House member Marjorie Taylor Greene (RF-GA) rolled out a bill that would absurdly censure the Palestinian-American House member Rashida Tlaib for “antisemitic activity, sympathizing with terrorist organizations, and leading an insurrection.”
Media’s Job: Trying to Keep Us in Da Box
The US corporate media is tasked with trying to pretend that all this lethal and fascistic madness is well, customary and routine, nothing thing to get all crazy and revolutionary about. Its job includes trying to normalize the escalating and deadly insanity – to take all the out da box shit reflecting the coming together of underlying contradictions and try to put it back into the container of the conventional, to make the new normal seem same as it ever was and ever could be. It will make its peace with a Fascist Amerika in 2025.
Thus, the dominant US communications complex persists for the most part in describing the ever more Nazified white Christian nationalist GOP as “conservative” and in treating the contest between the imperialist fascism-enabling Weimar Democrats and the eliminationist/exterminist Republi-fascists as pretty much the same old electoral horse race between America’s traditional two parties: the “liberal” (and even “left”) Democrats versus the “conservative” Democrats. “We’ll see what happens in 2024, by golly. The people will decide at the ballot box!”
The people will decide …through voting. Oh, indeed, you betchya! Never mind: that the US doesn’t elect its presidents by popular vote; that the absurdly powerful upper chamber of the US Congress is preposterously malapportioned in ways that vastly over-empower the most revanchist states and people of the country; that the lower chamber of the Congress is absurdly gerrymandered; that the whole US political system is distorted and corrupted by plutocratic campaign finance rules upheld by a brazenly corrupt and debased, Christian Fascist Supreme Court that is appointed for life by the undemocratically elected US president and Senate; that American “states’ rights” give revanchist jurisdictions across vast swaths of the country the power to make policy in bold defiance of majority national public opinion; that the “fourth estate,” the mass media that vastly shapes public political knowledge and opinion, is a capitalist-imperialist monopoly owned by a ruling class deeply invested in mass ignorance, division, diversion, and consent.
In da box indeed – the American ballot box, once cleverly described by the Marxian historian Alan Dawley as “the coffin of class consciousness.”
Normalizing fascism abroad as well as at home, the dominant media covers for “our good friend Israel,” with cable news making sure to follow every depersonalized report on mass Palestinian death (now conservatively estimated at 10,000, seven times the Israeli body count on October 7) with highly personalized stories on Israeli and American October 7th victims – never mind the massive and growing body county disparity, including a post-10-7 death toll of Gazan children far beyond the all-age death toll from Hamas’s horrific attack.
I’m sure many of my readers have heard and seen the US media taking seriously Israel’s language on how providing Gaza with fuel to survive will just boost Hamas’s “war machine.” WAR MACHINE? That takes some chutzpah. Want to see WAR MACHINES? Israel has and is a massive WAR MACHINE, funded and largely equipped by the US WAR MACHINE, which maintains more than 700 bases in more than 80 countries and accounts for 40% of all military spending on earth.
The media also takes seriously the Zionist Israel Lobby’s nauseating insistence that large US campus and big city protests against Israel’s genocidal war are “anti-Semitic.” It gives a platform to Zionist students who falsely claim that their elite college and university professors are virulent anti-Semites who revel in Hamas’s criminal attack. And it says nothing about the repellent fascist attacks on anti-genocide dissent within Israel itself.
There is of course never any serious historical and systemic context for the unfolding catastrophes provided in the reigning US media-politics culture. There is no discussion there of how all the destructive madness underway naturally emerges from five hundred-plus years of planet-igniting capitalism-imperialism and the depredations of the US-American Empire, the global superpower to which Israel owes its existence.
This great analytical and contextual vacuum is required and enforced by class rule and imperial doctrine, deeply internalized by media personnel. The talking heads and pundits know the rules. They don’t generally need a leash attached to their collars to walk obediently alongside their ruling class masters. These running dogs of imperial thought/population control behave in accord with the narrow parameters of acceptable debate and commentary set by the dominant order.
Those who step out of line lose their spots at the feeding bowl. That is the reality behind the oft-quoted Upton Sinclair remark that “it is hard to get someone to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.” Many US media operatives, politicians, and academics know much more than what they let on, but they also know very well that going public with their knowledge is a career and status killer and so, with rare examples, they comply.
The consent-manufacturing normalization function of the dominant media is not just about the news. That nation’s entertainment media is chock full of the regularization disease. Television, movies, streaming video games are heavily invested in the routinization of sadistic mass killing and humiliation and war, helping seed the fields of genocide, fascism, police-statism, and war amidst an ever-escalating climate catastrophe likely to fuel deepening fascisation, militarism, and new pandemics. The “banalization of evil” (Hannah Arendt) is one of “our” war and entertainment media’s favorite big money jams. Nothing is sacred under the relentless and cancerous anarchy of capital, under whose reign “all that is solid melts into air.” Everything, including life and health insurance, is a joke under the bourgeois system: “I think the duck goes the distance.”
The constant images of mass destruction, death, and devastation that are put up between infantilizing drug and insurance and car and pickup truck commercials on the corporate communications system’s dystopian telescreens feed the notion that “that’s the way it is. This is life.” The commercials themselves are loaded with capitalist ideology, promoting and serving the soulless religion of bourgeois self and personal acquisition over solidarity and commonality with others.
With the real, scientifically determinable causes of the leading contemporary and mutually reinforcing menaces to a decent human future (ecocide/pandemicide, fascism/arc-authoritarianism, and potentially nuclear global war) left out, no serious discussion of the real solution – people’s socialist revolution and transformation – is thinkable. The tragedies and catastrophes are widely portrayed and seen as unavoidable products of “human nature,” the eternal “human condition,” “God’s will,” punishment for sin, Orwellian conditioning, “hegemony,” and so on. That encourages depression, cynicism, despair, fatalism, and atomization, worsening “the human condition” by giving capitalism and imperialism a free pass to wreak yet more havoc.
It is all a great and outrageous lie. For the criminally normalized catastrophes of our time are in fact the results of scientifically unnecessary oppression and exploitation that could in fact be overcome, As the constantly slandered US Revcoms say, “there’s a whole different we could be living,” a whole different way of organizing our social, political, and environmental relations: revolutionary socialism on the path to communism and the abolition of all oppressive and exploitative relations. This is an unthinkable thought for many even and even especially on what passes for a Left in the US. It is far past the time to make actual people’s revolution thinkable again. The alternative to thinking on and acting for “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” is now clearly “the common ruin of all.”
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